Omnibus should be updated to use Ruby 1.9.3/Rubygems 1.8.10

Are there any known issues that would drive us to update Ruby from 1.9.2-p180?

I don't know of known issues for Ruby, only rubygems. I included Ruby 1.9.3 here since the conversation at the time indicated that people wanted to do both at the same time.

Ruby 1.9.3 is faster at loading if I'm right (but I didn't do a full bench on Windows yet).

I haven't done a proper benchmark either, but FWIW we are running 95% of our Chef nodes with 1.9.3 and chef-client does run a bit faster than 1.9.2.

The speedup depends on the mix of cookbooks in the run list, of course; but it is on the order of a few percent points, nothing earth-shattering.
Moreover, we only notice because we still run chef-client from cron; I expect folks running it as a daemon would see almost no difference in speed.

IMHO the argument about Ruby 1.9.3 being the current stable version is a valid one; I think pushing this as the default version for Omnibus would help future-proof it.
But I also think there are more urgent tasks on Omnibus

I believe this should work. https://github.com/opscode/omnibus/pull/5

See pull request.

Re-opening this as due to comment https://github.com/opscode/omnibus/pull/5#issuecomment-4182864 which closes the pull.

Follow-up comments in this thread on the mailing list indicate that Ruby 1.9.3 doesn't have the slow load time experienced by some users of the chef-full package.

Ticket CHEF-3295 reports the slow startup time for simply running "chef-client --help".

RubyGems is version 1.8.12, the current release is 1.8.24. There are numerous bug fixes, and an important security fix (1.8.23). I am not seeing any issues with 1.8.24 on my local systems (Mac OS X 10.8, Ubuntu 12.04).

The only issue I can see with RubyGems 1.8.24, is it includes the following from 1.8.23:

=== 1.8.23 / 2012-04-19

This release increases the security used when RubyGems is talking to
an https server. If you use a custom RubyGems server over SSL, this
release will cause RubyGems to no longer connect unless your SSL cert
is globally valid.

You can configure SSL certificate usage in RubyGems through the
:ssl_ca_cert and :ssl_verify_mode options in ~/.gemrc and /etc/gemrc.
The recommended way is to set :ssl_ca_cert to the CA certificate for
your server or a certificate bundle containing your CA certification.

You may also set :ssl_verify_mode to 0 to completely disable SSL
certificate checks, but this is not recommended.

However, this only affects people who are running their own RubyGems server - rubygems.org has a valid certificate, and the default sources does not use HTTPS.

% /opt/chef/embedded/bin/gem env
RubyGems Environment:
  - RUBYGEMS VERSION: 1.8.24
...
  - GEM CONFIGURATION:
     - :sources => ["http://rubygems.org/"]

Pull request updating Ruby and RubyGems:

https://github.com/opscode/omnibus-software/pull/3

Where do we need to watch to see when this is available in the chef-full bootstrap installer?

Nathan, we will comment here as to the resolution, but any major changed to the omnibus packages will be mentioned in the release notes on the blog. We always send out twitter and mailing list posts notifying of a release and linking to the blog, so you can follow @opscode or join the mailing lists.

Passed this along to Opscode Engineering.

The Chef 10.14.0 Omnibus release will have Ruby 1.9.3-p194 and Rubygems 1.8.24. Work is currently in the omnibus-software/performance-improvements branch and should be merged to master by EOD.